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Skeletons in the Garden

By

Jamie James

Updated June 1, 2001 12:01 a.m. ET

The anomalous popular success of Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" (1983) established a new genre: the learned whodunit. To be sure, there had been erudite popular novels since the infancy of the genre, notably Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey books, which were set among the academic elite of Oxford. But Mr. Eco used literary texts, liberally sprinkled with Latin, as the stuff and substance of his tale. Leslie Forbes's second novel is a distinguished new addition to the field. Her book, too, has its share of Latin, in the form of the scientific names of plants. As far as I know, "Fish, Blood...